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“I don’t know what the Republicans are going to do. We’ll see,” Hoyer said. “I do know that Democrats believe that when you have a disaster, when you have an emergency... Let me get it down to something all of us understand. It’s 30 degrees outside and all of a sudden your furnace breaks down. Guy comes out and says your furnace is dead, you need a new furnace. You don’t have $6,000 in your pocket, so you put it on your credit card. Because you need that heat on now. You need that emergency relief now. You need to respond to the crisis now. That’s what I think is appropriate.”

Hoyer added: “These folks are in an emergency situation. They are fellow citizens in the richest country on the face of the Earth. We can afford in the short term to make sure these folks are helped and in the long term we pay off whatever is necessary to do just that.”

But he added that helping people in the short-term doesn’t rule out Congress addressing its fiscal responsibilities over the long haul.

“Our side believes when you have Americans in trouble in the short term you need to help them,” he said. “In the long term, you need to pay for it.”